i'm obsessing over this screengrab I took of Orym mid-Ludinus speech (and seconds before Imogen shoves the lava on him).
like, look how fucking angry he is. that's the face of a man who is seeing the murderer of his family for the first time up close and personal and is personally plotting exactly how he's going to gut him.
can someone with better art skills than me please redraw this as Orym, I need angry halfling in my life so fucking badly.
Orym is the president of the "I hate Ludinus' guts and I want to spill them on the floor" fan club.
ludinus would be one of those dudes in the "am i the asshole" subreddit with a title that sounds like a really obviously benign thing but then you open it and it's the most batshit insane thing you've ever read.
I love that Ludinus fully does not obfuscate the fact that he's pretty chill with the Volstrucker program and kind of does imply the usefulness of the program for him, but he still thinks Trent sucks. He said "I can excuse the systemic torture and brainwashing of children into child soldiers and assassins, but I draw the line at pretending Trent is bearable to be around."
Genuinely it is so funny that Ludinus could have retained Ira's services (and avoided his revenge) if he'd just paid his contractor and not stolen his designs. Ira is a chaotic fey who was originally helping and had no issue with the purpose of the work freeing Predathos, he literally just wanted credit and payment. Ira is on the force of the Resistance purely out of vicious pettiness.
I think it’s really funny how clear Ludinus and the Vanguard’s bullshit becomes on Ruidius. The whole “our goal is to free mortals from the oppressive system of the gods” was already less than flimsy on Exandria, but then you get to Ruidius, where they seemingly have a pretty incredible amount of control, and wouldn’t you know it they’re happily enforcing a brand now oppressive power structure up there too. Not only that, but while the relationship Predathos has to the mortals who live under it is somewhat different from the one Exandrian mortals have to the Exandrian gods, it seems just as if not more controlling and oppressive. Predathos isn’t out here running a decentralized anarcho communist commune on the moon that bodes at all well for how it would run Exandria if it ate all the gods and was the only cosmically powerful entity left in charge. Ludinus and his gang are not looking for a way to pull Exandria out from under the oppressive boot of the gods, they just want to become the biggest boot.
A powerful elven mage who distrusted the religion of his home, railed against the religious leaders, locking himself away in his towers while he grew more powerful and obsessed with researching relics, eschewing friends and thought odd and isolated.
I just remembered Ludinus telling Caleb outright that Trent "has his uses", and with regard to the Scourger program, which Trent himself designed and pitched, "desperate requirements might call for unsavory methods."
And given that we know now that Ludinus has been singlemindedly focused on the current goals of the Ruby Vanguard for a lot longer than the program would've been in existence, I'm just imagining a timeline in which Caleb and Beau had not gotten the program shuttered in 836 PD, and that entire force of highly-conditioned, high level arcane assassins was simply at Ludinus's disposal.
“[…]A lot of it speaks of patterns of arcana across cultures, across time, across dates and you can see Exandrian calendar fragments. You can see notes on repetition and the shiftings of magic. You can see fonts of arcana and power that overlap with celestial events. There's a lot of noting where things continue to recur over long and short periods of time. […] With that, as you're doing this, you glance around and you can see there are other parts of this chamber where more of these notes are still somewhat present, haven't been taken entirely. So you begin to cut some of this away. You notice that in elements of these notes, it calls out historical specialists, people to reach out to in the world that might know this.”-Matt
Broke: Ludinus knew that Keyleth would draw out Vax because it was common knowledge that they were in love. if you knew about Vox Machina you knew this about them.
Woke: Ludinus knew that Keyleth would draw out Vax because he did his research on any and all possible champions of the Gods. Vax was the easiest to draw out.
Bespoke: Ludinus knew Keyleth would draw out Vax because he read The Daring Trials and Tribulations of Sir Taryon Darrington.